Bringing Home the Bacon Gets Tougher in the Age of Terror

Pants Bomber Causes Grief for Chefs Who Smuggle Salumi Into America

The Christmas Day underwear-bombing attempt won't just slow airport-security lines. It probably will also disrupt efforts to provide U.S. carnivores with quality salami, prosciutto and headcheese.

Last week, a federal grand jury indicted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who allegedly tried to set off a bomb hidden in his underpants on a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. The bomb didn't explode, but it spurred demand for pat-down searches, body scans and more-meticulous baggage examinations for airline passengers headed for the U.S.

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Mark Sanfilippo—slicing pancetta rigatino, a kind of Italian bacon—has based some of his cured-meat creations on food smuggled in from Europe.
August Jennewein

Such measures might discourage terrorists, but they are also likely to catch chefs smuggling meat from Europe. Chefs such as Rey Knight, who once flew from Italy to Miami with a pork shoulder and fennel-pollen salami vacuum-sealed and hidden inside a stainless-steel water bottle. Another time, he says, he hid a 4-pound goose-liver torchon from France inside the belly of a salmon.

Increased scrutiny of international travelers means "I'll have to come up with more creative ways" to get charcuterie into the U.S., says Mr. Knight, whose Knight Salumi Co. sells cured meats to San Diego-area restaurants.

Mr. Knight and other chefs go to such lengths because it is illegal to bring many of the world's most treasured meats into the country. (Fish are OK.) The government calls this smuggling. But chefs say their motives are mainly educational: They use them to reverse-engineer their own versions.

"Smuggling is something you do with drugs or kids," jokes executive chef Chris Cosentino, whose San Francisco restaurant Incanto specializes in dishes that use most every part of an animal. "Our goal is to improve the food system."

The salami Mr. Knight sneaked back became the model for a finocchiona he now sells in his shop for $16 for a 12-ounce piece. And the French torchon -- goose liver that has been wrapped in a cloth and poached -- became the basis of a foie gras terrine he makes on request. A local laboratory he hired to analyze it discovered that chartreuse was the secret ingredient.

Because customs officials once caught him with sausages made from donkey parts hidden in shoes packed in his luggage, Mr. Cosentino's bags were already subject to extra attention. He once got around that by duct taping to the inside of his blue jeans seeds for a special variety of chicory he found at a pet-food store in Bologna, Italy. Scanners able to see through clothing, now being installed in many foreign airports, should put an end to such practices.

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Wild-boar salami

Many chefs have stories to tell about sneaking food into the country. But the practice has been very popular among makers of salumi, an umbrella term for cured-meat products. Salumieres say artisan meats are on the verge of a big breakout in the U.S. To get there, however, these chefs say they need to study the world's best meat products, just as California's winemakers studied French vintages a generation ago.

But the government only allows imports that have been processed abroad by U.S.-certified slaughterhouses. Top salumi often comes from small European villages where people have no interest in following U.S. trade regulations.

"I wish there would be a provision for chefs to bring in foods" for educational purposes, says Staffan Terje, chef and owner of the San Francisco restaurant Perbacco. "It's contraband, but it's not like its ammunition."

Mr. Terje, who's brought back boar prosciutto and sausages made of donkey meat, says tasting and taking apart foods allows him to improve the dishes he serves in his restaurant. "When I'm traveling I'm usually in a hotel room" with only plastic utensils and dim light with which to study the meat, says Mr. Terje. "It's like an archeologist," he says, who makes a discovery in the field but does his analysis back at the museum.

After sneaking home some prized Italian lardo, a pig fat cured with rosemary, he concluded that the producers used animals that weighed more than 400 pounds, about twice the size of the pigs typically slaughtered in the U.S. He found a local farmer who would grow his pigs that large and now uses that meat in his restaurant. "It tastes more genuine," he says.

The government isn't moved by such arguments. Sausages and hams "are much more dangerous than people think," says Janice Mosher, an official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which seizes about 4,000 pounds of prohibited meat, plant and animal products a day. "Those items truly have the ability to spread disease." The government is concerned that bacteria from a smuggled piece of meat will spread through the ecosystem, infecting livestock and hurting agricultural production, Ms. Mosher says.

But aspiring Salumieres say they don't have much choice. "We do a lot of research in old cookbooks and they all say things like 'add the usual spices,'" says Mark Sanfilippo, who opened Salume Beddu in St. Louis in 2007. His partner, Ben Poremba, has brought back many prized cuts, including a coppa di Testa, a poached sausage made from pigs head and ear meat, and culatello, a prosciutto that's cured inside a pig's bladder. To get the culatello home, he bought two and packed them in different suitcases. One was found and confiscated.

Ms. Mosher, the Customs and Border Protection official, says that if people are caught bringing food in once, it's a good bet they'll be subjected to extra searches in the future. She says that Customs and Border Protection doesn't target chefs, but their exploits are known to the government.

Creminelli Fine Meats in Springville, Utah, owes its existence to salumiere Christiano Creminelli's ability to sneak cured meats he made past security in 2006. Mr. Creminelli was living in Italy at the time. He brought his tartufo, a salami made with truffles, and sopressata, which is cured with garlic-infused wine, to the U.S. to show potential business partners. On subsequent trips, Mr. Creminelli would hide some sausages deep in his bag and leave others on top of his belongings for officials to find.

Then, in 2007, he was stopped at the passport-inspection booth in Philadelphia. A police officer led him to a waiting room, and 15 minutes later he was taken into a small office by a customs official. "We know what you do," Mr. Creminelli says he was told by the official, who was holding a file with about 10 pages of information about him. The official told Mr. Creminelli: "Don't do it again."

Mr. Creminelli says the encounter made him quit bringing meats back from his visits to Europe. Lucky for him: When he flew home from Paris on New Year's Day, security officials frisked him and searched through his carry-on and checked baggage before letting him on the plane. "Right now, it is impossible to take something," he says.

While that may bad news for salumi makers, it made Mr. Creminelli feel better about the state of aviation security generally. "If they stop me for salami, hopefully they can stop someone who is doing something really wrong."

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